Abstrakt
This chapter reviews the diverse landscapes of education and literacy in medieval Central Europe. It addresses education infrastructures and their relations to Western European models, as well as the emerging literary languages of Central Europe's eastern areas, assessing the common elements of literacy and education as given by modern national literary histories.
In the early period, substantial variability in the choice of languages and script eventually resolved itself into patterns similar to those in Western Europe. It seems clear that by the end of the Middle Ages the educational infrastructure in Eastern Central Europe had become similar to Western European models, although its complexity tended to be lower and the density less.
Higher education was present in Bohemia and Poland at least, and by the fourteenth century this region produced literary works that raised the interest of medieval readers outside the region. The use of Czech as a literary language was prominent in the region, not only because of the sheer number of works written and the wide variety of genres and subjects for which it was used, but also because of the early use of printing to disseminate these texts.